


Unfurling Like a Fist to An Open Palm

by orphan_account



Category: Into the Badlands (TV)
Genre: F/M, Not Season/Series 02 Compliant, Short & Sweet
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-13
Updated: 2018-04-13
Packaged: 2019-04-22 04:31:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,707
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14300853
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: Tilda follows M.K. after the season one finale.





	Unfurling Like a Fist to An Open Palm

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this for [redinkpen](https://www.fanfiction.net/u/3573175/redinkpen) after she prompted me a *while* ago. I hadn't watched season 2 yet when I did, though I've thoroughly spoiled myself for it since, so this isn't compliant.
> 
> Title is from [here](https://jackieokcorral.tumblr.com/post/172725023551/waspabi-ada-lim%C3%B3n-2017).

Mother is going to be so angry.

Tilda isn’t stupid. She knows that no matter how much Mother protests her desire for an equitable world for all women, what she truly wants is a world where she can rule as much as a man. And that means that if one particular woman— _girl,_ whispers a frightened voice in the back of her mind, but she shoves it away—continually bucks Mother’s authority, she can expect to pay exactly the same price as any other Clipper who fails their Baron. A tool that cuts its owner must be destroyed.

But if Mother knew what Tilda just witnessed—if she’d seen M.K. be taken by the strange monks in the yellow robes—

Well, first of all, she’d be furious at this final confirmation of Tilda’s betrayal.

But second of all, she would have sent Tilda after M.K. anyway. So this is really just skipping a step to doing Mother’s bidding. Mother will probably thank her, in the long run.

Tilda clings to the bumper of the car and squeezes her eyes shut against the dust flying in its wake. She clamps her eyelids so tightly that she sees fireworks against the velvet black, and still she views the punishment she’ll endure when she returns.

Maybe she should have given Mother the poison after all. But she’s not Veil. She cannot see her way to a life unfettered by the control of another. All of Mother’s schooling has not added up to the ability to live out from underneath her benevolent cover. And she’d miss her sisters.

In any case, it’s too late for regrets now. Mother might have sent her into town to grab a forgotten text from a hiding place in the brothel, but she couldn’t have known about the bloodbath that Tilda would witness. And knowing what Tilda does now, about how the storm that clouds M.K.’s eyes drains his life as quickly as it destroys the bodies of those around him, she can’t let the monks take him. They’re as dangerous as he is, but M.K. is innocent, in a way even Tilda, by all accounts spoiled by her mother, has never had the luxury of being. She can’t leave him to the dubious charity of people who can take him down with a few well-placed jabs of their fingers.

No one travels at night when they’re this far from a Baron’s home. It’s too dangerous with the Nomads, who set traps for cars that are impossible to see under cover of darkness. As the sun dips low in the sky, Tilda pulls her sash tighter around her nose and mouth and readies herself to run the instant the car slows.

 

Even though she knows it’s stupid, Tilda takes a brief nap behind a hillock a few hundred feet west of the monks’ campsite. It turns out all right, though. She jerks to wakefulness to see only one of the monks alert, his attention more on the fire than on the perimeter. It seems weirdly careless, for someone who literally melded his consciousness with two other people’s to take down Sunny, but maybe the killing storm still weakens adults who have learned to control it.

Tilda sneaks around, light as a feather in a breeze, and sends her butterflies out into the darkness. They wedge into far-off sand with a whisper.

And just as she hoped, the monk goes to investigate.

The lock on the trunk is too thick for any of her blades, and her lockpicks have flown from their place in her hair in the speed of the monks’ travel. Taking the chance, she whispers, “M.K.!”

A long, incredulous moment of silence, and then she hears, “ _Tilda_?”

She closes her eyes, pressing her forehead to the metal as if it’s his skin. Hating herself even as she asks, she says, “Can you cut yourself?” The silence has a different quality this time, but maybe that’s just her guilty conscience. “I’m sorry—I can’t think of anything else to do.”

“Maybe you should let them take me. I’m dangerous.”

The denial wells up from her heart, exiting in a growl that doesn’t even sound like her voice. “ _No._ ”

“Tilda, you should—”

But she never gets to hear what she should do, because the two monks still asleep at the fire rise to their feet as one.

Run, or fight?

Mother always says that to run is as valorous a choice as to fight, depending upon the circumstances. _But you must always be prepared to do either one, Tilda._

One of the monks flits across the campsite, in that unsettling smoothness of motion they display. The next instant, before Tilda can adjust to her new position, her hand is slicing at Tilda’s throat. The other monk lands a series of blows to her ribs, and she can’t help the cry that escapes at the pain. M.K. shouts in reply, and the box begins to quake.

The third monk returns, and Tilda’s heart sinks, even as she blocks and spins away from their combined attack. Outmatched. She’s outmatched in every way. She should have chosen to run.

The box doesn’t so much open as it _explodes_ , and M.K. floats above the ground like a god of war come to smite his own acolytes. She saw him fight at the brothel, but this is different even from that frenzy. The force he summons crackles around him in every direction. All he has to do is whirl in place, one arm outstretched, the other drawn close to his chest like an archer drawing back his bowstring, and the monks go flying in every direction at an arc which will not see them land for quite some time.

On his wrist, she sees ragged bite marks, the impetus he’d needed for escape.

He turns on Tilda, whose knees give out before the black stare. She’s about to die, but she calls him again anyway. “M.K.!” The storm-wild gaze roils. His eyebrows furrow.

He collapses.

Cursing and trying not to cry, Tilda drags him to the car and shoves him into the back seat, taking off her coat to cover him. She’s never driven before, but there can’t be that much to it, and here in the desert there’s nothing to hit but sky. After a false start or two, she manages to get them going in the right direction.

After an hour, M.K. finally stirs with a moan.

“I know, I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have asked you to do it!” she bursts out, not daring to take her eyes from the road stretching endlessly before her.

“I’m glad you did.” His voice sounds shredded and raw. “Where’s Sunny?”

“I don’t know.” Dead, probably. It was three against one, and even though she hoped, she knew it was in vain even before he was thrown through an entire building. “Are you okay?” _Besides getting closer to death every time you have to save me or yourself?_

“Fine.” He curls up on himself when he says it, though, and she recognizes the signs.

“You’re hungry. Check my coat pocket. I usually carry food but I don’t know what I have left.”

Some rustling, then she hears wax paper crinkle. “You have… two tea cakes. Want one?”

“No, that’s all right.” She’s hungry, too, but she hasn’t had her life force drained by a berserker rage lately, so she feels it’s only fair to let him eat it all.

“Thank you.”

“Where am I taking you, M.K.?”

“I think I might have to go wherever you’re going,” he admits, very quietly. “I can’t survive on my own in the Badlands. Or anywhere.”

Her voice goes sharp with fear. “I’m going back to Mother’s.”

“Then so am I.” He says it with defiance at odds with the slump of his shoulders in the rear view mirror.

“She’s going to use you.” Tilda waits, but he makes no reply. “She says she used to be like you.”

“But she’s not anymore?”

Ah. That’s interested him. “I don’t think so. Her eyes don’t become a storm the way yours do.”

He stays quiet for the rest of the ride, and she concentrates on driving.

She spots the first Cog, striding down the road in service of his baron, in the same moment M.K. says, “I’ve changed my mind. I can’t go to the Widow.”

“Good.” She dares to glance at his reflection again. He’s staring at the back of her head with something like sadness on his face. “What’s wrong?”

“Every time I see you, it feels like the last time, and I don’t want it to be,” he admits, soft, and her belly flutters with the caress of it.

“We’re fated to meet again every time we part.” She pulls to the side of the road and turns in her seat to offer a tight-lipped smile. “You should go. I need to find a place to hide the car.”

“All right.” He hands her coat back to her. “Tilda?”

Tilda waits, but he seems suspended in the moment, as slow as a drop of molasses clinging to the mouth of a bottle in the winter cold. His gaze flickers from her eyes, to her mouth, and back again. She folds her lips in on themselves, hiding them from her own temptation.

At last, he leans forward, so so slow, every move telegraphed before he makes it— _see, this is no threat, I mean you no harm, say no if you like_ —and presses his mouth to hers. Tilda lets her eyes fall shut and leans into the pressure and heat. Everything about him feels so safe, and that’s so dangerous, but she can’t shake it. She just wants to hold on.

“Goodbye,” he whispers, lips shaping the words against her mouth. She breathes in the farewell even as he leaves.

_Stop smiling,_ she orders herself, driving away.

But her coat, piled up in her lap in a way that will mean terrible wrinkles, still smells of him, boy and sweat and the faintest trace of the soap Quinn gives his Colts. She’ll sleep with it tonight, and pretend he never took it off.


End file.
